Vocabulary
Togs, Bathers or Swimmers? What You Wear in the Water
Queensland and New Zealand say togs. Victoria and Western Australia say bathers. Britain mostly says swimsuit. It is one of the few vocabulary splits that cuts Australia internally rather than from the rest of the English-speaking world.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call the clothing you swim in?
The ordinary word, not a brand.
- Togs
- Bathers
- Swimmers
- Swimsuit / swimming costume
- Something else
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
Swimsuit / swimming costume
Expected in 3 of the survey's accent profiles.
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.